1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to data movement or replication, and more particularly to a system and method of multicast movement and/or replication of source data in a scalable manner.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional direct memory access (DMA) operations move information from one location to another, typically independent of a central processor or central processing unit (CPU). Conventional DMA operations are inefficient when the information is moved from a source location to multiple destination locations since the same source information had to be read for each destination requiring multiple reads from the same source location. The inefficiency is made worse when the multiple destinations have different attributes, such as different offsets and byte counts. For applications in which the source information is copied to many (e.g., up to thousands of) target locations, repeated source reads dramatically multiplies system bandwidth consumption.
In certain data path applications, source data, such as packet header data, is copied to multiple target locations. Conventional DMA is sufficient in normal memory copy applications in which the source data is copied to a single target. Conventional DMA is not efficient in multicast applications since it requires one read per target. DMA transactions in a multicast application is inefficient and consumes valuable system bandwidth.